


through the smoke and crowd

by elftrash



Category: The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-22
Updated: 2019-08-22
Packaged: 2020-09-23 21:14:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 542
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20346814
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elftrash/pseuds/elftrash
Summary: Luthien Tinuviel was as lovely as the day, and her fair skin glowed like the moon at night.It made sleep somewhat difficult.





	through the smoke and crowd

**Author's Note:**

> FOR #16

Luthien Tinuviel was as lovely as the day, and her fair skin glowed like the moon at night. 

It made sleep somewhat difficult.

“My love,” Beren whispered. “Is there no way you can – turn it off?”

“Alas, no,” Luthien said. “But I will sing you a song about many things – seeds in winter ground, waiting for summer, and round-bellied bears in their long rest, and dormice curled in the hand, and I will sing of the child nestled in his mother’s arms, and the mazing mysteries around the Western Lands that rock all sailors who dare into slumber – and you will sleep, my love.”

-

“It makes you self-conscious?” Luthien asked, and pulled her long midnight hair back so her radiant body shone in the clearing, fair as ivory and luminous as a star. Her nipples and navel were dark smudges in the night, and there was a darker shadow at the fork of her thighs. Beren couldn’t see her face clearly – the light wasn’t quite bright enough for that – but he knew that there was a frown troubling his beloved’s fair face as she struggled with yet another concept alien to her, and to all her kind.

“I just – I worry that everyone for miles around can see us,” Beren said. “I know it’s foolish. We came to Ossiriand for the quiet, after all.”

“There’s hardly anyone around,” Luthien promised, and kissed him gently. “A doe and her fawn; innumerable rabbits; and of course the nightingales. But my mother will be glad to know that we take such joy in each other, so you needn’t fear.”

“Aaaah,” Beren said, and rolled himself off her and into the shelter of his cloak.

-

“Do you not think it an excellent compromise?” asked his fairy bride, her face shadowed by the strange horned shape of the Bat-cloak she had won in fell contest with Thuringwethil the Dark. The skin she had stripped from her victim had lost none of its power, and it still melded itself to her like it was her own, falling in velvet-dark folds around her, sinking her jewel-bright eyes in mysterious shadows and sharpening her white teeth. Her mouth, always as tender as a rose in bloom, bloomed redder still.

The pearly glow of her skin had disappeared, but the shadow darker than shadow that enveloped her was more terrifying still.

“I am full of awe,” Beren said, and he did not lie. 

“You could wear the Wolf-hame, if you like,” said his wife. “And instead of Luthien the Fair, I will be Tinuviel of the Twilight; and you will be not Beren One-Handed the Brave, but a fell and terrible creature of Gorthaur, and together we shall sport in the night.”

“- Yet I would prefer to remain Beren the Brave,” said Beren, and Luthien laughed her sweet laugh like silver bells and spread her bat-wings around them.

And Beren was afraid, but not unmanned, for he loved Luthien the Fair in all her forms, and the prick of her too-sharp teeth in his shoulder proved only a goad to greater deeds; and in the clearing they played at Tinuviel of the Twilight taking Brave Beren for her own, and not even the nightingales could see them in the velvet shadows.


End file.
